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November Chronicle by Gayatri Kodikal & Matthew Wang.

As the movie screening of the cult film ‘Bamboozled’ by Spike Lee filtered into the night, the atmosphere of the group grew grim and retrospective. It was a powerful start to the factory, led by Rana Hamadeh. Our discussions wound down a labyrinth of ideas, unravelling the intricacies and the various possibilities of justice, debt, indebtedness; from love, governance, humour and the unreadable, to contemplating a possible mapping technique of all these experiences inspired by the mobius strip. If it wasn’t for the cold we would have been outside, perhaps in a park, projecting our ideas further across the horizon.

A roundtable of introductions were given by each member; intensities and lines of flight formed; tentacular networks and allegiances made. All participate with a common ‘debt’, one might say, an ‘investment’ in the theme, each other, and the shared wounds that cut deep into the personal. How are our unspeakable wounds articulated; the unintelligible, the untold, how are they brought into the light? We dabble in multiple languages, fabled excesses, drawing with bodies — all may result in epic failure, yet, fail ‘well’ we must, for it is this which allows us to bear witness to our own fallibility. We shall for now, chart these developments through a collective lexicon; a body, a map, a plane, offering us and our witnesses a topology towards a roaming assembly.

Roaming Assembly Discussions

Editorial ‘Meeting’ Format

Two roles: Conceptual Framework of the Roaming Assembly, What the group is doing during the roaming assembly. Is it a content related contribution? Theatrical, choreographic? Full group doing one thing? Organisational aspect? One collective page for the ‘conceptual’, one for the ‘performative’? Roaming Assembly = May

Fran - Spectators: Models or formats whether spectatorship is an aspect of it?

5 More More Meetings - 7.5 Days... It is possible to create a ’score’ for each DAI week, but not necessarily? If there is a guest, then a particular score, if not, another score?

Simone - Berlin, crematorium. Conceptual framework, where people then respond to it on that day. Expanding of quality instead of quantity? Slow reading 5 days to read 3.5 pages.. nice to do a slow reading. Could there be a reading together, slow reading together rather than pre-reading it? Going into depth without losing the context of the room. Personal political questions related to the subject, then going into the theoretical.

Where does a project like this ‘cut deep’. Formulation of a question? How can it be something more different from just something ‘confessional’? (Simone) suggests not doing it in the ‘previous’ format of the roundtable speaking, images for example.

What are we doing with our labour is trying to figure out a form, a form because the cutting questions cannot be articulated. The unarticulated is also a form. Does it become for us, a pressure to ‘deliver’ each time. to ‘ourselves’, to deliver a FORMAL attempt, which we can leave a kind of temporal or spatial limitations. Formal is for example, a 30 second video etc.

In what ways does the project tap into what we feel, pokes, that doubt, or the wound of the body that we are working on in our ‘practices’.. how do we export ourselves outside.. Is it about ‘FINDING relevancy’ to one’s self, outwards in?

Mandus - Sieving something?

Vanita - Iterative processes?

When there is a library, standing in front of all these books, there are so many connections in the mind that’s just the ‘deep’ investigative search. The lexicon, first is an index of terms, how to make that index grow and sieve, it is also, what we are putting as ‘a meaning’, it can have a ‘performative aspect’ in it, possibly a gesture that’s invented, in a way we are complicating the relation, the ‘meaning’ of the term, during the time we’re together and not together. A mapping process.. the lexicon is our job.. the personal/political, could also be a channel for the lexicon.. which star was brighter the last time, this time this star should be brighter, we found this article that makes it brighter, so we can look at it now. Topographical, cartographical practice. What’s visible and not visible, but also the DOCUMENTATION of the movement. What are the skills we need to ‘visualise’ the movement of the thinking.

Thinking of these as ‘tasks’.

~ The mapping and the memory of the map, the visibilities and invisibles also coming to the fore.

~ An interface that allows us to ‘overwrite’

Is it a process of negotiation or a process of consensus? They are different gestures. What is popping up or what is leaving us? Visualisation is only a formal.. We are theorising the entire practice of map making. Can map making happen outside the geographic paradigm.

Where is the project of ‘exiting the subject’ stays? Tentacled maps? Overwriting vs adding. Overwriting doesn’t necessarily mean deletion. Exiting the subject as a difficult task of ‘how to embody the ethics of’.. What is the relation to ‘what is it to own, to relate to ‘property’. Not just a technical question, a subject is a subject because it owns its object. Property and ownership in the collective idea of this project..?

Matthew - Question of justice doesn’t arise without the witness of an injustice? Act of Inscribing - The act of an inscription - Almost like a charter, or constitution.. Precedental quality of law, ‘the motion of adding’.. iterations of..

Transcapable - Fungibility

History of writing is a history of the law? Co-authorship? constituted through the logic of authorship, even if its multiplicatory.. if it’s not co-authorship, is it about figuring out the sociality of text. The ability of a text or language to bring into bring a type of sociality.. It’s not ‘community’ building, not ‘initiative’ building, what sociality is ‘desired’.. Also the ‘space’ in which it’s set, parameters.

The Social Life of Financial Derivatives

We may reach the end and think, bullshit, but there is something else that allows us to think through the bullshit.. Trying to invent form to a certain desire for a certain unknown sociality, which might be a failure, we need to figure out why it’s an absolute failure, and articulate our relationship to that absolute failure.. Not to be harsh to ourselves, that we are ‘doing good’, working with methods, devising tools, we go on and go on forever, until something ‘works’.

For a ‘public moment’.. whether we are ‘reading’, singing, or whatever, we have to keep in mind for ‘rehearsal’.. Rehearsal of ‘OVERWRITING’ the map, with our bodies, through that, we are creating an extra layer to the content.

If there are 15 terms in the lexicon, then there are maybe 15 maps. When map is said, it might not be a map that ‘we are looking at’, there is a process involved in the generation of an encounter, an encounter that is in movement. When we say several maps, it might not be several representations.

Love and loss structures based on ideas of ownership. What does love bring to the table in terms of justice.

Queer love - not just ‘love among queer’ but love that is queer. When is it legible, when is love read as love. Wealth of theological notions. ‘We forget how regardless of our opinions of secularism’, secularism is a theological position that is constituted through religion, with its political loads. Religion and religious thinking, and practice, and ritualistic, particularly in terms of justice. Why the ritualistic, because when speaking of some sort of sociality, (broadly), no ‘sociality’ can be outside the ‘ritualistic’, in the sense of (emerging as testimonial subjects).. What the testimonial ‘previously’ meant - in connection to the testimony constituted through the logics of the law, the validity of the legal, but outside the space of the law. The testimonial is all that is absolutely alien to the domain of legibility which constitutes the legal, all that is unreadable, unspeakable. The moment it ‘exists’ it’s legible.

‘Who is who we want to invite?’ Start to have fantasies of ‘shared’ moments, however antithetical to the idea of ‘process’.. maybe it’s choosing people whose thinking is malleable enough.

Karina - What is a the vessel and where is it moving to? Is it a balloon, or fast car, or star trek.. Is the designation, you can alienate the process into another plane, it’s helpful.

Mobius Strips - Desire of our sociality. On a bus, or on a spaceship? Are we on our existing structures, or phantasmagorically somewhere else?

Thinking of a fictional perspective, how with fiction can we stretch the current conditions. To Vanita -> To visualise or to make the illegible legible is the modern project. It’s not ABOUT making the illegible legible (it’s a crime, genocidal), it’s about what type of ethics (not politics), the testimonial in place of the political altogether.. theorising doesn’t mean we are just sitting there writing, we as artist, are there making a claim, claims about what art should be etc. To Simone -> To fictionalise.. we make an a-b route, we don’t know what we want to reach, to fictionalise, to create these affects, or writing through creating a practice but tangential but going into the woods rather than on the road, we will never reach point B, point B will change immediately the moment you move from point A. Walking to B through the woods.

Film - Spike Lee Bamboozled + Discussions

Conversations about Film

Delacroix

DunWitty

Big Black Af

Sloane

Manray & Walmack

Father and Mother

Maus Maus

The ‘Band’

The Audience

How do we take that film? Provocation ‘misfired’. Scenes that summed up the film? - Radio Confrontation. No lighting at the opening film, the materiality of the film? Film being particularly sensitive to white skin. Black face and white faces under the eye of tracking and surveillance.

Number 24 - Back faced to the audience. The pointing to an externality of the ‘scene’. Revisited later.

Ritual of the makeup. Pitching of Pierre to Dunwitty, hyping up like a play. Manray’s dancing and getting angry at the dancers. Rappers are doing their justice, what is happening there?

Mis-en-abyme. It’s not only Declacroix making people wear blackface, it was convincing everyone producing, etc, also wear it. It is a self-reproductive work.

That are the mechanisms governing the film. Full of paradoxes and oxymorons. What is just now is unjust later. What is good is evil suddenly. Everything is ‘flipping’ instantaneously. Reproduced. Spectators watching, we are watching the spectators as spectators. First scene is already establishing the spectatorship of TV, spectacle of theatre.

The violence of spectatorship - the film boils to 5 moments, boiled to 3, boiled to 1.

~ Tap dancing in the street for a white corporate audience

~ Man Ray is tap dancing on the table, violence and force

~ Man Ray coming on stage without make up. When he starts dancing without the make up. Dunwitty cannot register or read the dancing, exorcising performance from the demand to perform. Performing without the makeup, this was the performance was unreadable as performance, unreadable as dance. It was only readable under the conditions of the demand. Tap dancing with the bullets.

What does it mean to be screening a film like this, with us, in a group like this? What does it mean to be influenced by work like this, and how does one be influenced by work like this.

What the film does is confusing the question of justice. They are acting of acting, there is an exaggeration of ‘I am acting for you’ the operation of spectacle in every single moment of that film. The acting changes throughout the film. The camera changes throughout the film. ‘Ok you didn’t get enough, I give you more, I give you more, give you more’.

‘Politically Incorrect’ - There is an embarrassment OF watching, ‘oh shit I shouldn’t be the spectator of this film’. The moment we see the audience of blackface, we become the spectator, we become implicated. The blackface audience and us. Every time we are implicated so deeply in such a way that our positionally in relation to the film. Us also looking at each other during the film.

The ‘getting there’ e.t.c. with relation to the father, his death was a reflection between the father and son. It’s performative on a deep level, as in it is performing us.

Sound track - Throughout the entire film there was some soft jazz, so people could never really speak without being interrupted with dramatised music

Brechtian moments where people were referring to themselves.

Endurance is always portrayed as an activist trait, struggle, struggle never ‘ends’? How little endurance you have for something you’re complicit in, you’re not committing in some way.. Part of the endurance of the complicity instead of the complicity of the struggle. ‘I got it, now go on - NO, you didn’t get it, sit in and watch’ - Sit in and watch and continue to do so and each time you continue to be complicit.

Fred Moten - The Break - By saying I don’t want to reproduce, it is producing someway, by negation of the reproduction, there is something ELSE at stake.

When speaking of justice and debt, how to complicate such subjects outside normative discourses that speak of debt and speak of justice?

Simone - Should we talk about the unreadable. Become illegible. The illegible should formulate conditions of life. In movies, the illegible is either destroyed. ‘The only person that was shot was the ‘white guy’. We’re tapping into some kind of history that we’re not necessarily familiar with has nothing to do with what we’re trying to do right now? That moment is also a moment of illegibility - like, Big Black Af, it’s illegible.

It’s important that the project is not to make the invisible visible, not to make the unreadable readable, it’s a project that is shared but tapping into something that is ‘out there’. It is exiting the subject as master, object as slave. It is an ontology. 3/5 is not a full person, for voting. We’re talking about histories.. even if we are seemingly talking about USA, each of us come form a place where these forms are formative. The fact that we are citizens, the fact that we share the status of citizenship makes ‘US’ that we are sharing right now a very particular us. Because we take for granted that citizenship is there, we have names, passports, citizenship, this is not something normal, normative probably yes. Half the planet doesn’t, we are citizens, ‘legal’ subjects, what would it mean to exit the ideology of that ‘subject’.

So much discourse around queering the museum, decolonising the museum, etc. ‘Feminism’ museum, there is NO feminist museum, and there is NO feminist museum. There should be no museum in the first place if its feminist. There’s acquire more things into the museum, let’s bring in more female and decolonial works into the museum then we ‘have done our job’. Anecdote of the ‘totem’ have to be cut up, and the totems now are ‘sought’ permission to do this (the problem of permissions totally missing the point). It’s a museum narrative that’s self-celebratory moment. Another group came and said exactly the same thing, imagine that board meeting, the ‘programme’ and saying, yes we agree to that. ‘They are happy’, it’s not like ‘ oh it’s sacred, don’t touch it, but more like ‘HEY that are happy.’

Spectatorship and the social? You talked about watching the film as a group. The spectators social - between each other, exaggeration and augmentation of the subject through the interface of the spectator. To grow, but also to grow in ambiguity. We take for granted for our subject hood, we eat, we etc.. we do our ‘stuff’, but we also then go and march and say ‘we are against capitalism etc’... there is no separation now in the fact we practice our citizenship, we are ourselves practicing some form of justice that is constituted through a radical injustice.

Fred Motens - The Primal Scene

The making of the slave can never be done without violence. It is the imposition of the violence where the subject becomes which and object becomes which. The structure that normalises.

The feeling of torture... He shows at the end, violent racism, ties it up. Punch to the face at the end.. This catered embarrassment.. If you have linear thought of history.. now 3/5 oh, now you’re a full human being, you’re now buying into the project of freedom, we can now feel like, oh my god, there ‘WAS A TIME’, when you’re embarassed you’re buying into this project of freedom. This audience who ‘needs’ this kind of punch, it shows this constant belief in the project of ‘freedom’.

Compilation is very violent and frontal. This ‘landing’ of reality. There are two different realities, the ‘movie’, and the ‘reality’, forces the reality.

It’s not about, oh, it was wrong, now you’re a full citizen. It’s important to understand what project that freedom sucks is all about. It’s ground to the entire premise, justice, ‘Hold on’, what are we talking about, is it the question or are we setting up wrong sets of question when talking about justice. It is not about how to ‘seek justice’, problematising the entire concept of justice and it’s ontology and what is it that we are talking about under conditions of.

Exorcise performance from the demand to perform. The word demand.

Exercises - “Free” writing

Courtroom Introductions

Vanita

Architecture - Disciplines as issues - Anti-disciplinary. Developer driven architecture. Trawling industries. Economy zones where land grabs happen. Bombay and the periphery of Bombay. Health managed under colonial rule. Correction in the form of disciplinary practice, research as ‘mapping’, making people who are invisible visible without their choice. In the act of benevolence what are you actually doing. Architecture is a form of correction, you’ll live this way, not that. Justice is the rise of fixing things. Institutions that affect policy, enabling investment in a particular area. World Resource Institute. Problem with collecting and problem with data. Permission.

Video of fisherman song and rhyme

Police archives, crime without crime happening - going to jail

Cedric Robinson - The Terms of Order

Matthew

One-to-one format, social owing in art (social turn) - work with elders, children.. Business background.. Re-thinking some of the concepts I was trained, or built to do. Legality - Just that there be law, law is not justice. Experiences in the military and it informing my current disposition. Forms of control imposed upon the body.

How much of questions around ethics and morality is about jurisprudence - Linguistics

Old Notes and Teachings - Lecture Notes

Memory - Body - The body that carries - remnant - memory of the past? - when speaking memory in terms the body, points to the thing augmented in the present?

High Frequency trading algorithms. Algorithms trading at such a speed that it was ‘out of balance’. This connected to ideas of mechanic translation.

The work that we’re doing, not necessarily. The project IS a project on translation without us necessary knowing it? Figuring out a ground for thinking about translation without. Debt of the virtue of being born into it.

Sandro Mezzadra - Heterolingual

Victor Pelledreas - Amun-ra?

Fran

Performance practices. Organising performance events.

The Debt Collective. Link up people with debt in camera. Having a subject people thought was taboo. Safety in numbers approach. Lobbying’ - the main act of a member is to ‘be in it’. Group provides counselling etc. Are there helping or further normalising behaviour? Interested in the shame angle?

UK, everyone has huge amounts of debt. The debt of ideologies, having engrained ways of behaving. Visibility in places such as ‘club’ nights. Not in terms of safe space politics, but places for people to share narratives?

The tide seems to be going towards to debt? But not so much about the world justice? Is debt the ontology for justice? It requires us to figure out what do we want from, and what do we mean by justice, and whether it’s a relevant question for us or not. The words ‘Derivative’, the terms, what are we attaching to terms used? Is there something called derivative justice?

The Debt Collective

Cookie Mueller - Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black

Simone

Philosophy. Writing essayistic books and for theatre. Text based, but feels like a betrayal to the body. The body is always in there. Mind-body separation. Paradox, loving words, and reading, but on the other hand bodily aspects, sensuous thinking always missed at the same time. Combining now?

Trial against Geert Wilders. Using the body to view what was in a trial. Someone who HAS power because he is given attention to. Should I give more attention to a figure when the person works on attention economy.

Economy of attention, shifting to all the other bodies in the room, but not to think about one person as a main character but all the people in the room as main characters, we are lured into this ‘eventfulness’. Flows of energy in the room. Clothing and formal clothing. On the one hand it was an outsider and others were not. Others - allowed ‘in’.

Working on memory. Countering the idea of scarcity of memory. Neurological discourses. There’s only so much you can ‘remember’, Nietzsche you have to ‘get rid of the past’ to live in the present. Can live in the present while commemorate the past.

The whole purpose of bringing that person to court is ‘justice’, affect or idea of racism is not at all present in the room. Everything in the court was all TECHNICAL, whether justice can be brought. The more protocol it is, the more real or rational justice is. It doesn’t deal with affect of racism. Justice became this protocol meaning. Bodily level, used as protection, this is how we ‘protect’.

The perseveration of life - the death. The backing of the gun. Violence. ‘Cyclical conception of injustice’. Violence is inflicted and then there is more violence. Endurance, enduring violence is a form of refusal at all? Gendered endurance and silent endurance of women, with ties in with cyclical. They call it revenge fantasy. Is the revenge fantasy a way to find justice or reduce injustices. The Watermelon Woman as revenge fantasy. You create a fantasy to relax, or to balance.

Walter Beniolo

Alicia Harris - Is God Is + Supplement

Cheryl Dunye - The Watermelon Woman

Sepideh

Visual arts. Place. Locating oneself. Putting oneself in the object of knowledge, breaking the object-subject dichotomy. Personal intentions are a driving force. Looking at the sky in relation to the scarred, or firm, ground. One’s place in space, time, universe. The earth beneath one’s feet is not as firm as in Iran. Capitalism here has a totally different meaning. International relations of countries. Who defines the meaning of justice, who is ruling is justice.

Amir Naderi - Harmonica Film

Mandus

Attien Faraxade? - For Europa Discourse. Plagiarised Ginsburg poetry? Textual indebtedness enforced upon her. Concepts of intertextuality, paraphrasing. She makes explicit the debt of Europa in terms of the colonial past. Transformed in a way of indebting her to the canon of the coloniser.

Interests in particular groups in China. South-west. The incomplete proletariat. Is the question to the subject structured around property? No ~ Legitimacy. China opening the doors to the world. Remunerations to the west. Missionaries coming, to ‘help’ but also to colonise. Gender, sexuality, marriage procedures changing with the introduction of ‘rules’ of the missionaries. Linkages to memory, how to position yourself. Desire and modernity.

Division between rural and urban. Transference of urban crises to the rural. China as an internal colonising itself. ‘Soft landing’ for economic crises.

8 Crises - 10 Times Economic Crisis?

Assem

Masculinity and the performance of masculinity.

Swedish Luxury trap - Framing debt, pathological. Pathologising debt and addiction. Pathologising of debt, it’s not a problem to get help, the help is invested in keeping it and portraying it as an individual problem?

Honour killings as justice, done without any form of law. Non-recognised forms of violence through these other forms. ’Soft Loans’. Examples of revenge killing in cultural practice. To reconcile what has happened between two families. Institutions of justice. What does the educational ‘owe us’. Questions of the ‘end of education’. What the hell is missing? Is it that we’ve focused too much on this or that? Let’s go without guilt towards something or the other. It is that which mobilises to figure out what is not there yet. Debt to bankruptcy, but debt also is commodified. We are taking an assumption that justice is what we seek. Speculating debt, feudalism and enslavement as a result of debt. In some ways it connects to the history of property, the imposition of ownership on something and somebody, the mediation (of buying and selling) is what’s different?

Musical keyboards as mediation between the body and the strings. What you’re doing is your using a proxy figure to pluck the proxy finger. The mutation between the bodily and the concept or the affect. The physicality is constituted through the writing, what governs the movement, which seems as physical as playing the instrument is another logic. Connected to the word Derivative? It has caused a mutation in a concept, not just a buffer, not just the fastness of accessibility, just mutates the entire concept of access, it transform our entire relation to the concept of sociality.

Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism

Gayatri

Filmmaking. Game Design. Encounter with archaeological artefact. Colonial histories of the Portuguese. What do you ‘desire’ from this factory? - Gong through the associations, law, justice, but also image of the derivative. Imaginaries of debt and indebtedness.

Court - Chaitanya Tamhane

Jiatu

Industrial Design - LCC Photography. Master and slave dialectic. Why do we desire our own suppression. Racism and its mechanics, the desire for facist structures. Climate justice. Greenhouse gases in developed countries. Reparations. Climate Debt. Compensation justified, opening door to capitalist investments. Lucrative markets formed around climate and carbon, start a new round of capitalist accumulations and accruals. Value making. Capitalism as life in negation, the reevaluation of value. Principle of law, if the law is based on negation or affirmation of life.

Negation and affirmation - Solon (Greek) Lawmaker. Waived the debt for the lower classes. Same in China. And redistribution of land. How it’s done was very different. The creation of moral high-ground, in China, encouraging the lower-class to destroy the upper class. China’s land revolution (land reform). Morality.. how to start a revolution where the morality is life affirming, not negation of life.

To Live - Zhang YiMou

M - Fritz Lang

Maxime

Cinema. Sensitive surfaces. Technical cinema. Getting closer to the making of film. Fine arts. Curating. Modes of organisation. Social bond, Leibniz. Game. The participation of the game, speculations of the outcomes. Everyone ‘puts in the game’ something with an intention of a return or outcome. Reflections of living together, to political authority, sovereignty. Temporality and heritage..

Benjamin Riclou - Avant Garde?

Hal Foster - What's new about the new avant garde

Jean-Claude Larrieu

Interest. “Interest in”. The loaded term of the “interest”. Reparations. Reconciliation. Punishment (Islamic Interpretation of Punishment)

Punishing the body where it has committed the crime. You have to dispossessed the hand from the body that committed the crime. Foucault.

Laws regarding refugees - possessions of migrants over €10,000 be dispossessed to pay for the processing. Colonial payments to France?

Emmanuel Levinas - How to discuss temporality, past, future etc.

Martina

Financial performances. Balance. Presenting earning and spends. Taking a look of the entrepreneurial self also within art. Paid work of waiting jobs. Talking to a non-existing crowd.

Balance

Claire Denis - High Life

Karina

Hybrid Stages. Studio now with technology becomes a hybrid space.

Hypocrisy. The subjectivity of the performer or dancer.

Kathy Acker - Against Ordinary Language, the Language of the Body

Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch

Aesop’s Fable - The Belly and the Members

Demonisation of witches. Feminists and uprising of witches as threats to power? Recognising the witches.. distributed propaganda for recognising a witch. Extermination of the opposition.

Athlete - the worker of the body. Bodybuilding.. Related to the organs of the body.

Rana

The type of program, the type of studentship. Not interested in making art, rather articulating intellectual projects. Methods for articulating one’s project.

Alienness - All that does not belong to the realm of the law. Also the ‘extra-planetary’ space. How to constitute subject outside the paradigm of earth and ground. We started to build lexicon attaching words to an archive. (In Italics)

Claims - Let us think justice of which the degree to one can access the dramaturgy of theatre.

How to constitute oneself as a legal subject shifted to. ‘What does it mean to ‘emerge’ as a testimonial subject, outside the bounds of the court of law. Later shifting to.. emergence as testimonial subject. To the proposition in debt, gratitude, hospitality, and the question of sociality. Thinking of the opera project through the plane of debt.

Structured way to ‘tap into’ concepts. Building a hierarchy of these terms to help going to the next step for coming up of the framework of the roaming assembly. It’s not a problem solving venture, it’s a workshop for us to complicate the terms and terminologies that we don’t normally question. Aberrant Understanding of certain terminology. Shaking the ground, and dancing on it.

Currently there is a format, of the ‘confessional’. Part of the lexicon can be a choreographic one. What was translated English is that which was allowed to be translated into English. Invitation of sources of non-English language and not translated because there might be certain logics, structures, problematic or not problematic.